SS Rajamouli appears to be attempting to give the impression to Indian audiences and local OTT heads that he has secured significant Hollywood reach for the film Varanasi.
In this process, he brought a few American reporters to Hyderabad to interact with him, as well as with the cast and crew.
But the question is, which channels are these, and who exactly are these reporters?
Rajamouli gave an interview to a channel called Screen Rant Plus, which has only around 157K subscribers and very limited traction within Hollywood circles.
The shocking thing is that in recent times, the highest-viewed video so far is the Rajamouli interview, which has crossed 180K views.
The second-highest is the group interview on the Varanasi caste. The third-highest viewed video has only 971 views. That’s alarming! The most viewed one is related to 'Citadel' 2 years ago that garnered some 8.4M views.
The irony becomes evident when one looks at the comments section under Rajamouli's interview on this channel, almost all the comments are from Telugu audiences, with virtually no engagement from Hollywood viewers.
What is even more ironic is that most of the comments are not about the content of the interview or what Rajamouli conveyed, but about the looks of the interviewer.
Examples include:
- “Interviewer also looking like Mahesh Babu”
- “The interviewer can straightaway walk into a movie as a hero!”
- “Reporter looks like a hero from 1970s Hollywood movies”
- “The interviewer looks dashing”
And the comments go on in the same vein praising the reporter.
As a result, the outcome of this interview was that the audience connected more with the interviewer’s appearance than with Rajamouli’s message or the film itself.
The other channel involved is Collider Interviews. It is shocking to see that many of their videos receive only a few hundred, or at best a thousand, views.
The interviewers from this channel were brought to Hyderabad to interview Mahesh Babu, Priyanka Chopra, and Prithviraj Sukumaran.
Across the entire history of this channel, only one video has performed exceptionally well, garnering around 3.4 million views seven years ago, related to the OTT series Stranger Things.
This clearly shows that the popularity of the topic drives views, not the popularity of the channel itself.
So far, the Varanasi interview video has crossed 607K views, and once again, the comments are predominantly from Telugu audiences rather than Hollywood viewers.
Overall, Rajamouli seems to be completely ignoring local media and focusing exclusively on interacting with white-skinned reporters this time.
During RRR, he largely focused on Bollywood media while completely sidelining Telugu media. Now, he appears to be ignoring Indian media as a whole.
He brings in white-skinned reporters from independent channels, flies them in business or first class, accommodates them in star hotels, and hosts expensive dinners, all for little to no meaningful traction.
Bringing Hollywood media to Hyderabad would indeed be a great move only if he managed to attract genuinely influential outlets such as, Entertainment Tonight, E! News, TMZ, People, Deadline and even CNN or FOX News to give hype around "Varanasi" as the biggest ever historical event happening in Indian Cinema. This is what the nation expects from the hugely talented Rajamouli but not anything smaller.
What Rajamouli needs to realise is that the film’s core audience is Indian, with a significant portion being Telugu.
Failing to connect with them and focusing only on Hollywood media, while communicating primarily in English, does little to resonate with Telugu film lovers.